These States Drink The Most Wine Per Capita

Posted: Jan 09, 2019

Some states would seem more conducive for consuming wine than others: There’s a reason the movie Sideways was set in California and not in Iowa (though a sequel set in Iowa might be an interesting departure!). But does the amount of wine a state produces correlate with how much wine a state consumes? The site VinePair recently broke down which states drink the most wine — both in pure volume and per capita — based on info from the National Institutes of Health, and the results aren’t always so cut and dry.

When it comes to total wine consumption, the top five wine drinking states are also, (perhaps unsurprisingly) the five most populous states: only the order changes. The wine volume list goes California, Florida, New York, Texas, and Illinois. The population list goes California, Texas, Florida, New York, Illinois. You can speculate for yourself as to why Texas slipped down a couple spots on the former list. Meanwhile, with the bottom five states, a couple states jump out. Though the five least populous states in the U.S. are Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, North Dakota, and South Dakota, when it comes to wine consumption, the five states with the lowest total volume are Wyoming, West Virginia, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Alaska. Clearly, Vermont is drinking more than its fair share, whereas West Virginia is full of serious abstainers.

But obviously, the per capita numbers provide a much stronger indication as to how much wine drinking is happening in different states since it removes population bias from the equation. On that list, Idaho — by a significant margin — leads the country in wine drinking, followed by Delaware, New Hampshire, New Mexico, and Vermont. (Though, for the record, VinePair notes that New Hampshire’s low alcohol taxes may have helped it land its higher spot on the list.) The states that drink the least wine per capita: West Virginia, Kansas, Mississippi, Utah, and Oklahoma.

But what about states like California and New York? Where do they fall on the per capita list? You can see the entire map of the U.S. over at VinePair.